Many surgical procedures require the use of orthopedic instruments and ancillary instruments, such as resection guides, gauges, tracking devices, and positioning apparatus. Often times, these various instruments are interactive and need to be assembled and disassembled with each other, thereby requiring some sort of assembly during the surgical procedure. For example, total knee arthroplasty instrumentation frequently requires the use of locating styli or navigation trackers to properly align resection guides. These positioning tools must typically be removably attached to their respective resection guides, to allow for both easy insertion and proper use of the resection guides during surgery.
There have been many attempts at designing coupling means to assemble ancillary instruments, such as tibial and femoral styli, to their counterpart instrument (e.g.—resection guides) during surgery. These means include threaded designs, ball plunger designs and tongue and groove designs. However, problems exist with each of these designs. Threaded designs take significant time to align, turn, and lock. Additionally, applying adequate locking torque to a relatively small screw head is difficult to do with slippery gloves. Ball plunger designs are not ergonomic to use, as they are generally designed to be activated from the top by compressing a spring loaded release button with the thumb, while holding and stabilizing the instrument with the index and middle fingers. If the ancillary instrument is being attached to an instrument already secured to the bone, operating a ball plunger requires the hand to be forced into a partially supinated position that is not optimum from an ergonomic stand point. Finally, tongue and groove designs are used primarily in tibial cutting guides where a slot used for the saw blade is already present. This design is thus limited to instruments that may not be able to accommodate a slot due to size and/or shape constraints.
For the foregoing reasons, there exists a need for a coupler or connector that is quick and easy to utilize.